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Time Dimension To Become Space-like
KentuckyFC writes "The Universe is about to flip from having three dimensions of space and one of time to having four dimensions of space. That's the conclusion of a group of Spanish astrophysicists who have calculated that observers inside such a Universe would see it expanding and accelerating away from them just before the flip (abstract, full paper pdf on the physics arXiv). 'We show that regular changes of signature on brane-worlds in AdS bulks may account for some types of the recently fashionable sudden singularities. Therefore, the fact that the Universe seems to approach a future sudden singularity at an accelerated rate of expansion might simply be an indication that our braneworld is about to change from Lorentzian to Euclidean signature. Both the brane and the bulk remain fully regular everywhere.'" Update: 10/09 16:06 GMT by Z : A few readers have written in to point out that the article is not peer-reviewed; your mileage may vary.
So that's whats going to happen when the Mayan calender rolls over in 2012.
So that would be Time and Relitive Dimensions in Space? (oh, and first?)
Oh, I'm living in a tesseract,
a four dimensional box.
It's bigger on the inside,
what why my four-space rocks!
When you get on the inside,
the outside becomes the in,
Dimensionally speaking,
it's all about the spin.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If only Einstein was around to see it :)
Avoid poetry, coastal cities, and the Catskill mountains. Seriously.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
this last post is still out of place...
So what does this mean for the atoms-of-my-fingernails-being-a-tiny-universe theory?
Does this mean I'm gonna get fatter?
Nobody Expects the Spanish Astrophysicists! In fact, our two main weapons are theory and telescopes, theory and telescopes, and an insane amount of genius, wait that's three, our three main weapons are...
If time becomes space-like, what would that mean for us? Would we be able to transverse time as easily as space? Would time itself become irrelevent as we could look "forwards"? Will the cubs win the world series? These important questions have to be answered!
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Now we are all going to have to get jobs working for Inetech fixing the Y4D problem with computers........
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
Will DHS raise the Astrophysical Phenomenon Terror (APPT) alert level to Orange? ...But seriously I wonder if we as 3 dimensional beings would even notice such a change? Isn't "time" only subtlety different from a physical dimension?
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
If this could lead to parallel worlds.
TFA can be found at our new domain, timecube.asia
bomb the us up set someone
I first read this theory in Oolong Caloophid's seminal work: "Where God Went Wrong."
More of this is elaborated in his development of these themes: "Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes," and "Who Is This God Person Anyway?".
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
So what does this mean for us, exactly? Would we still perceive things as we do now (only with some relativistic stuff changing), or does everything suddenly go nuts? FTL travel, maybe?
And mostly-OT but seemed related: I remember a couple of SF short stories about something like this... one was "Mimsy were the Bogroves" or something like that, where two kids discover 4-dimensional toys from the future, then read "Jabberwocky" and figure out how to move in time.
The other one was about a kid who befriends a neighbor working in 4-D stuff. The kid (because he's young and has an open mind or something) learns to move about in that dimension as well, and communicate with creatures living in other dimensions. Don't remember the title of that one, thoguh.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
Another important question is, "When is this expected to happen?"
In our lifetime?
In the lifetime of our species?
In the lifetime of our sun?
Before the expected "heat death" of the universe?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Jeebus will return ! Clean your browsing history and cache.
\u262D = \u5350
Does this perhaps we will unlock the mystery of time travel and be able to move about in it much as we do 3D space?
The title of the article is: "Is the accelerated expansion evidence of a forthcoming change of signature?". It indicates that a change of signature is certainly a possible explanation, but that doesn't mean that there aren't other explanations.
That being said, what is the best way to handle the signature change? Should I stand in a doorway or head for the storm cellar?
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
Can anyone explain, by way of analogy, what having four time-like dimensions and no time-like dimensions would entail? Would everything just . . . stop? Would our current motion through time carry forward through Newton's Laws, so that we don't even notice the switch? I did RTFA, and it's light on details. I attempted to RTF paper, and immediately zoned out. So, anyone understand this well enough to attempt to clarify?
where the theories and calculations of the brightest brains in the room become indistinguishable from the random brainfarts of two stoners sitting on a smelly couch in a dorm room at 4:20 AM
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
when it & the sperm whale materialized above magrathea?
I really hope I'm not in the DMV when time ends.
"Ladies and gentlemen," Max Quordlepleen said, "The Universe as we know it has now been in existence for over one hundred and seventy thousand million billion years and will be ending in a little over half an hour. So, welcome one and all to Milliways, the Restaurant at the End of the Universe!"
I'll have (wioll haven be) an order of Ameglian Major Cow Steak and a green salad...
"A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it." - Churchill
is this theory based solely on the observation that the universe is expanding?
I could theorize that the fsm is stretching the universe with his giant noodley appendages, and I wouldn't be any more right than they are.
So when my 3D becomes 4D, does this mean I do extra damage?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
The peers are going to review this a few centimeters from now; give them time.
How many goddamned times do we have to have this discussion on here?
Math is a language. It is a means whereby describe things to the best of our comprehension in a manner that best conveys our impressions to others.
Just because a bunch of numbers add up does not mean it is proof of anything. Otherwise, Creationists are right and the world began in 4004 BC.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Human physiology is fairly dependent on the laws of physics remaining the same. For example; Our cells consist of fluid, constrained by a cell membrane that prevents it escaping in any of the three spacial dimensions. The introduction of a fourth spacial dimension means instant, messy death.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
So dpilot was talking with God, and God said, "To Me, a minute is like a million years, and a million years are like a minute." So dpilot said, "In a that vein, is a penny like a billion dollars, and a dollars like a penny?" God replied, "You've got it." Which led dpilot to ask of God, "Can you spare a penny?" "Sure," said God, "in just a minute..."
When you say "about to" in sports, something generally happens pretty fast.
When you say "about to" in geology, something generally happens pretty slow.
Generally speaking, saying "about to" in cosmology is to geology as geology is to sports.
But not always. At some points in time, the volcano under Yellowstone does go off. Likewise, supernovas happen, and perhaps brane changes too. But to say "about to" or "soon" is just meaningless to human scales of time.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
hopefully The Chaos will save us!
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
YOU can profit from the coming singularity! Singularity Investor has the answer!
Sure, it sounds bad, but with every big change comes winners and losers and you can be one of the winners if you act now!
Oh, wait, that's how to profit from that other singularity...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Does this mean that the universe is going to suddenly go All of an Instant on us? Because that'd be pretty sweet.
Anyone else think the comments just weren't rendering right before they turned off ABP and saw ads?
I'd like to know how they define "about to flip".
Are we talking about something they see as imminent -- could happen at any moment?
Or are we talking about geological time scales -- it'll happen in a few hundred thousand years, give or take?
Or do they mean cosmological scales -- where 'about to happen' means somewhere in the next ten or twenty million years?
Or is the whole question of when a silly thing to ask, given that they're talking about the end of time as sequential/chronological?
This explains the rudiments of string theory.
I wonder where the Bible predicts this will happen.
Update: 10/09 18:08 GMT by Impy: Oh, wait. That wasn't peer reviewed, either.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Relativity talks of space and time as a single 4-dimensional 'spacetime'.
M-Theory, Superstrings, p-Branes, and a billion other theories all say there are 10 (or 11) dimensions, including things like two-dimensional "time" and "imaginary-time" dimensions, smaller "curled-up" spacial dimensions, etc.
we are going to transcend into another dimension with the flip... wait ! thats nothing new is it ! "when the mooooon is in the seveenth houuseeee, and jupiteeerr aliiggnss wiiith maaarss"
maybe mamas and papas got it right.
Read radical news here
...they want their band back.
Don't put anything you want smart people to see in a directory named /ads/
What happened to TFA will happen to all of the rest of the universe.
It isn't slashdotted, it is just frozen in time.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
When the new space dimension appears there will be a land rush!
I can see it now, those people selling land rights on the moon will start taking offers for forth dimensional rights.
Not that anyone reads them, but due to the slashdotting, here ya go:
It don't get much weirder than this. The universe is about to lose its dimension of time says a group of theoretical astrobods at the University of Salamanca in Spain. And they got the evidence to prove it.
The idea comes from the study of braneworlds: the thinking that the universe we see around us is a 4-dimensional cosmos called a braneworld embedded in a multidimensional universe. The "signature" of our universe is the number of space and time-like dimensions it has: in our case we got 3 space-like dimensions and one time-like dimension. It's what astrobods call a Lorentzian universe. So far so good: lots of astronutters think the same thing.
But our universe may not always have been like this. Some theorists think it may once have had a Euclidean signature meaning that all the dimensions were space-like. Now Marc "Bars" Mars and a few pals in Spain say that the Universe's signature might be about to flip from Lorentzian to Euclidean. In other words, our dimension of time is about turn space-like. Gulp!
This ain't entirely bonkers and here's why. Bars Mars has calculated what it's like to be an observer in a universe that is about to flip and get this: it would look as if it were expanding and accelerating away from us. Sound familiar?
Yep, it's exactly what astrobods have been observin over the last few years, a phenomenon they attribute to dark energy. If Bars Mars is right, dark energy ain't got nothing to do with it and we're all starin' down the barrel of a cosmic catastrophe.
Still, maybe four space-like dimensions will be better than three. Who needs time anyway?
Get that last game in before your game stops working with your newly created 144-sided dice.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
All this talk about time becoming a spatial dimension and realities collapsing is making my brane hurt.
Yeah, I said it.
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
All things being equal, this might just be what North America needs to get IPv6 deployment stepped up a notch. I know I'm going to be asking our router vendors whether their IPv6 solution is the key to meeting our customer's demands through the upcoming Euclidean braneworld revolution.
The new marklar will not only mean all our marklar's are obsolete, but our marklar's will actually cease to function as well. Marklar told marklar personally that a new marklar is in developement. Should the marklar come to be, a new marklar will be issued to each marklar so other marklar's can tell a marklar from a marklar. Don't you marklars get it?
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, For you are crunchy and go well with ketchup.
After RTFA I quickly delved into the PDF for more information. Now I'm left feeling like I'm the butt of another technobabble joke. It's looking more and more like string theory is getting a bit frayed.
Something tells me that no matter how much we all secretly wish for a cataclysmic event of biblical proportions so we can live out our sci-fi fantasies, there just isn't going to be anything that significant to happen over the next few billion years.
Want an adventure? Go outside! The universe is always unfolding as it should, and you get to be a part of it.
Blessed with all the brains that God gave a duck's ass, and twice the charisma.
Uh... what?
I always thought of time as an abstract concept, with no interactions in the real world. Kinda like imaginary numbers. It's useful for us to calculate with, but it doesn't exist as a travel medium or physical medium. You just move around in 3D space thats it. I can't comprehend how you can move through time! I'm most likely wrong cos I'm not a scientist or anything so maybe someone can explain it to me :D.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I knew 3 answers to the Fermi Paradox. Either intelligence quickly builds into quiet-looking shells like in Charlie Stross' Accelerando, or by virtue of being conscious we humans have somehow carved out a light cone or domain excluding other intelligences, some wierd cocoon: it is impossible physically to communicate because other domains have other physics. There's a neat scifi story about that too. The third is a land mine in physics, waiting for young civilizations to liberate enough power to fry them. Heinlein did that one, it's a nasty one. Now a fourth: the universe really is out to get us. Not just out to get aggressive monkeys that want to learn high-energy physics, but even to the point of making a state flip ever so often. I think this last one (today's news) is pretty unlikely to happen any time soon but nevertheless it is a future killer, something harder to understand than the burning out of the stars in the far future. None of these are very nice ideas but I hope some physicists will step up to answering what the latest theory says about when it might happen and whether it could operate on a patchwork basis, killing other civilizations while our planet was still cooling.
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Clearly this change of the fourth dimension from Lorentzian to Euclidean signature is happening because we are consuming too many fossil fuels and generating interdimensional carbon dioxide! Someone please alert Al Gore!!
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Update: 10/09 16:06 GMT by Z : A few readers have written in to point out that the article is not peer-reviewed; your mileage may vary.
Does that mean that all the other articles on slashdot are peer reviewed? I think it's great if slashdot does some more fact-checking on what goes through, but I kinda always assumed that anything posted on slashdot was typically highly sensationalist if not complete bullshit.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
slashdotters comment on science topics. Top comments are always "Funny" because no one really understands what it's all about and so everybody just makes stupid jokes instead.
...that most of modern Physics is just one giant put-on? That string theory, branes, etc. are about as grounded in reality as counting angels on pinheads?
It appears to me that this is a purely mathematical result. They are basically saying that an anti-de sitter bulk, the interior of anti de Sitter (AdS) space which is a constant negatively curved (or constant positive cosmological constant) with one time-like dimension (Lorentzian space) can be glued to a euclidean space smoothly along the boundary of the two spaces. Classically, this is of little relevance since time-based trajectories would stop at the boundary (either take infinite time to arrive or the system would "rip" itself apart at the boundary). Instead there could be (though not addressed in the paper) observable quantum effects from having something past the boundary even if it is purely spatial. Space-time states might extend over the boudary into this other space. So you might end up with the strange situation where parts of the universe are interacting beyond the end of time.
This paper doesn't tell you whether that occurs or not. But it does indicate that it is possible for quantum systems to have both Lorentzian and Euclidean space components seamlessly connected.So does this mean I will live forever, but die if I go too far from where I started?
If I can't ever go back in time now, can I then never go back in space?
We all march through time at the same "rate" (what ever that unitless velocity means!), does this mean we will now all have to move through space at the same velocity?
And the biggest question: Right now I'm a single entity that exists as collection points in 3 dimensions, and a collection of lines connecting them through time. If my points in space diverge I atomize. If there's no time how do I move in space?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
A few readers have written in to point out that the article is not peer-reviewed
Not only that, it is based on M-Theory (is that still what they are calling it these days?). M-Theory was the brain child of a bunch of mathematicians; an attempt at building a model that could resolve the conflicts between general relativity and quantum mechanics.
The equations that they produced seem to resolve those conflicts, but do so by proposing the existence of a whole host of previously unobserved (and currently unobservable) entities. Good arguments can be made that this violates the principle of Ockham's Razor. Either way, the bottom line is that the evidence just isn't there.
So far, M-Theory is not really a Theory, but rather an untested hypothesis. Once the evidence rolls in I will change my tune, but until then I consider it to be little more than idle speculation.
Silly Spaniards playing bogus number games. Quaternions are numbers, like the reals, but with 4 parts, a scalar one for time, and a 3-vector for 3D space. A scalar ain't never gonna be a vector. Ever. There is no finger pointing for scalars. This is why there is no arrow for time, never will be, but there is an arrow for spacetime, due to the space part of spacetime. If you look up "Standard Model" on YouTube, not arXiv, you can see they symmetries of EM, the weak force, the strong force, and gravity, U(1), SU(2), SU(3), and Diff(M) respectively. Those 4 symmetries are involved in the norm of two quaternions, where q* q' = 1. Play with the quaternion 4D wave equation, and you get competition for GR.
doug
barking up a real 4D tree by himself
instead of making dumb 11D claims
Working on new views of old physics at http://VisualPhysics.org
Ok, so basically, if this makes no sense to you at all (I don't even know if some of those 'words' in the article exist, WTH is a braneworld!) then you must have already flipped your shit right?
When any of these theories actually provide any real world benefits or assist in some tracable and tangable way in the same then please feel free to wake me up. BTW incidental contributions to the field of mathmatics *does not count*
Just from the blurb quoted, it sounds like this paper was randomly generated from a list of buzzwords. Did someone write the astrophysics version of the Rooter paper?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/15/hoax_paper_accepted/
Ever seen End of Evangelion?
Sounds about right.
Ummm...what happened? This was a first post when I wrote it.
I'll be able to get my genuine Klein Bottle!
This would be a perfect place to recruit for any Discordian sect you may be Episkopos of.
This is what happens when you dial 9 chevrons on stargate.
As we all know, "time is money". And, with the dollar fall, the time is very likely to shrink and become insignificant.
MOD this one up as funny if you understand the joke, OTHERWISE LEAVE IT FRICKIN' ALONE.
Infuriate left and right
an insane amount of genius
Funny but does it require genius to understand that nothing can move in spacetime, by definition? It's just simple logic, IMO. This is the reason that Sir Karl Popper called spacetime, Einstein's block universe in which nothing happens. Don't take my word for it, look it up! Apparently, our brilliant Spanish astrophysicists don't understand simple logic. Otherwise, they would have figured out that a time dimension is nonsense to start with. The universe is 4-dimensional and it is already spatial. A time dimension is crackpottery.
Read Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics and get the facts.
The 3rd dimension is what killed off the dinosaurs and now the 4th is going to be our demise!
..maybe if I wait a few feet it'll feel better
Ok, as others have pointed out, this "paper" is not peer reviewed. I want to make it clear that I don't personally feel slashdot is the place to debate random physics papers on the arXiv. But, being slashdot, I will ignore my own pleas for sanity. What would be the physical consequences of time suddenly becoming space-like? First, on most mesoscopic scales in our everyday life, time already appears like a spatial dimension. Newton certainly thought so and our (incorrect) intuition tells us this is the case. The degree to which special and general relativity play a role in your everyday life is a measure of how "time-like" time feels. Probably not much. Nevertheless, if time suddenly physically became space-like, physicists all over the world would know it right away. All the weird stuff in relativity like time dilation and space contraction and so on, comes from time having an opposite metric sign as space. These effects all go away if time is space-like. For example, in a typical advanced undergraduate physics lab, you might measure the lifetime of a muon that is sitting in the lab as opposed to one that is crashing down from the sky. The one coming from above (at a large fraction the speed of light) lives longer in the frame of the ground because of time dilation. Easily verified in an afternoon. But I guess no more (at least after next Thursday or whenever this is supposed to happen). Similarly, all the special relativity equations required to perform basic momentum, energy, and lifetime calculations at colliders like Fermilab, CERN, and Brookhaven would suddenly stop working. That would be a big deal and it wouldn't be a subtle thing. IMHO, it makes for great science fiction, but I'm not sure where these guys are going with it.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
'We show that regular changes of signature on brane-worlds in AdS bulks may account for some types of the recently fashionable sudden singularities. Therefore, the fact that the Universe seems to approach a future sudden singularity at an accelerated rate of expansion might simply be an indication that our braneworld is about to change from Lorentzian to Euclidean signature. Both the brane and the bulk remain fully regular everywhere.'"
*blink* *blink*
Ya hurt yer what?
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Change requires time. It's a logical paradox.
You're assuming that there is only one time dimension. But actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
when is this going to happen?... I mean WHERE is this going to happen?... I mean... uhm... damnit!
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
> If only Einstein was around to see it :)
:P
Too linear thinking!
Maybe he gets to see it...
Yet another buzz word to add to the collection. Universe 2.0 anyone? :p
is now and ever shall be
world without end.
When I first heard that the rate of the universe's expansion was actually accelerating, I came up with a weird hypothesis after a few days...
Time in our frame of reference is slowing down.
The only way that seemed possible was if we were traveling at speeds close to c, but that didn't sound feasible since we were observing objects that were moving away from us, in all directions. Then another weird thought occurred to me...
Our observed universe is self-contained within the event horizon of a giant black hole.
We're closer to the singularity, and accelerating towards it faster than objects closer to the edge of the event horizon. Time will move slower for us, and far away objects will appear to speed up. An outside observer (if such a thing could possibly exist) would perceive our universe as shrinking, but in our current frame of reference, we still think of it as expanding.
One other observation that lends to this possibility is the fact that we have not seen evidence of other "Big Bangs" or other "Universes". If the Big Bang happened once, shouldn't it be a repeatable occurrence in the limitless void of space?
Okay, that's my rant. You can slap the straitjacket on me now and ship me off to the funny farm.
Solomon Chang
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
It's the pinnacle of horrendous narrative ever spewed:
"Conscience was thus forever frozen in time, like a savegame in Diablo is"
Ack!
this is the best explanation on this matter I've seen so far. Bravo!
You forgot a few:
CONSPIRACY: We HAVE made contact. Now that you know, I have to kill you.
PHASE SHIFT: We're looking for signals in radio waves, but due to relativistic differences in velocity between us and other intelligent civilizations, their broadcasts are arriving in deep infrared.
ACTIVE JAMMING: They don't want us to look, and they've developed sufficient FTL technology to get between their early signals and us.
EARLY TO THE PARTY: Somebody had to be first...
GAH LAK TUS: 'Nuff said, true believer.
The flow of entropy will reverse or break its link to the time dimension? This would not necessarily be so "bad" but it would completely break down most of the laws of physics that depend on this phenomenon, thus destroying the universe, no? Oh, it would be bad. In case you're fuzzy on the whole "good/bad" thing, try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light. That would be bad.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
overlords.
Breaking "time's arrow" will really fuck with our verb tenses.
But I worried about that tomorrow...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
i.e. the universe will screw itself over only from the point of view of some people, but not others?
That should be interesting. I don't know why that would happen just because a paper didn't get peer-reviewed, though. And we'll never known what would happen to the universe if the paper did get peer-reviewed before release..
So... Time is going to be space?
Guess that means that the End is Near.
Branes! More branes!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
http://www.superliminal.com/cube/cube.htm
:wq
And more on topic, Can I say that the arrow of time is an illusion?
Be here now.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Oh no, not again...
Check out my blog!
In Cosmological time, that's as close as we'll get to 'in the blink of an eye'.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Somebody is about to find the question to life, the universe, and everything!
What you reap is what you sow
This really put "oomph!" into the phrase:
"Apres Moi Le Déluge..." -Louis the 16th...
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Brane and brane -- What is brane ?
This is the best restaurant I ever eat in
What, no zombie jokes yet? They've already eaten your branes?
Edith Keeler Must Die
flipping us the bird?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Nuthin' detracts from scientific journalism more 'n talkin' like a fsckin' hillbilly.
By an odd coincidence, it was the Fifth Dimension.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Though I'm not great with the advanced formulas in this paper, I'd like to understand if I'm coming to the right conclusions based on the assumptions in this paper. It seems to suggest that the acceleration the universe is experiencing and "dark matter" are actually a product of the gravity created by the mass in the rest of time. Also, that we are in a 5-dimensional universe, the 4th being time, and the 5th I cannot discern.
Also, if the 5th dimension is a time dimension, and our natural ability to sense time is based on the energy in our brains moving/experiencing the changes, when the 4th dimension flips would not now said energy continue to flow across a much larger brain and continue to experience, but all time said creature was assembled?
Where genius and insanity become confused true wisdom is found
so 5th dimension their song ? just what ? i dont get it.
Read radical news here
probably in a few years they'll say that one more dimension will flip out. that'll make 5.
Read radical news here
I wonder what this will mean for the Time Cube guy.
Time Cube: It's the Goatse for Logical Thought
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
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Another possibility: We get their signals all the time, but the signals consist of highly compressed data spread over a wide frequency range, so we can't distinguish them from pure noise.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
You could always walk back to the past if you like the old universe better
Don't blink, don't turn away, don't close your eyes, and whatever you do, don't blink!
(for those of you who didn't recognize the Doctor Who quote in the parent, turn in your geek badge!)
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
So, how long do we have?
It would be really scary if the waveform collapsed into the "zombie Einstein" state.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I don't think we have to worry about time folding into another spacial dimension.
What will happen sooner, and what we should be worrying about, is a time when electromagnetism breaks down into two distinct forces and all "normal" matter breaking down. This event would finally allow "dark" matter to ascend into intelligent life forms within this universe. Too bad, that 'time' will eventually catch up to those arrogant "darkies" and squash their tiny butts flat as a pancake!
I tried to read the submitters summary, but I just couldn't. It was like he took a bunch of scientific sounding words and put them together randomly. Almost like what a preschooler would do with those little word magnets.
Do the editors try to read these things before posting?
You still haven't produced the code for COSA, its been more than a month. Do you have it?
I suggest you read Relativity by Albert Einstein. He explains Special Relativity in simple mathematics that even somebody who has taken Algebra in US public school system can understand.
I will refer you to the following questionnaire: Are you a quack?
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
I think I heard that parts of Indiana were considering not participating in this shift.
Time ended. Yesterday.
Physics isn't my high point, and think I must be oversimplifying this or at least missing the point, but wouldn't this be fairly straightforward physics thinking?
Doesn't this kind of go hand in hand with the big bang to begin with? You start with matter without a time dimension, then it explodes and "gains" this time dimension. Then, inevitably, it collapses upon itself and loses that "time dimension" once again. The second that matter gains time as a property, the clock automatically starts counting down to the point where it looses it. Much like, if you want to look at life in a morbid fashion, the second you are born you are on your journey to the grave.
As I said, I'm no expert in this so if there's more than meets the eye here, feel free to expand my horizons (no pun intented).
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
The funny part is that they cannot even define space. For these "theorists" there is the liability of spinning in more and more, and come up with crazier and crazier ideas...
I heard a story about one of these guys being on a ship and being asked to plot their course out of the harbor, which begins with locating where they are. A couple of hours later, when already out to sea, he had completed these fantastic formulas, which incidentally placed them squarely on shore.
Of course all that was needed was to go top ship and make a couple of sightings and within minutes locate their position on the map. Too much trying to figure out rather then just observing.
Update: 10/09 16:06 GMT by Z : A few readers have written in to point out that the article is not peer-reviewed; your mileage may vary.
A few readers have written in to point out that the article is unintelligible; your mileage may vary.
Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.
We'll all need to brush up on our time travel hyper-grammar. Or we will-wollen will.
This means we really will be able to make the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs!
f u cn rd ths u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmng
What's this going to do to the place where your mind lives? I only ask because in my universe this flip has already happened. Reality is broken, causality works in both directions, events in the past cause things in the future as before, but now I can see events in the future causing things in the past. I hear voices which come to me through the eternal now; and when I go looking I can see additional messages encoded within "fictional media". Simply trying to overcome the memetic virus embeded in my consciousness by my upbringing (you'd probably know it as Judeo-Christian religion) had me throwing myself of a bridge convinced I was the reincarnation of Judas. And when I discovered 'the beast' I found myself able to shapeshift, percieve the future, bend space and time, and unlock the secrets of the unconscious.
And if you think I've merely been watching Heroes and gotten confused, this all kicked off months before that show started, but somehow I've gotten entangled with it. The oddest thing in that regard has to be the conversation I had with the voice of Malcom McDowell then having him crop up as Mr Linderman several days later.
I do have an explination, but you're not going to like it.
Personally I simply wish I could fix my teeth so I could come to terms with all this without the distraction.
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
Ceci n'est pas une post.
When I was three or four years old, my parents were teaching me to tell time. At one point, they asked me which was longer, a half-hour or an hour. I said, "a half-hour." They asked me "By how much?" and I replied "8 millimeters."
How right I was.
I think it's a bit more than that. They glue two models together. The Wick rotation in question occurs over the boundary between these two pieces, assuming I understand this correctly. Then they come up with a consistent quantization accross the boundary.
Of course, let's not even mention the fact that they're proposing that braneworlds and AdS are reasonable approaches to physics...Well, we're still looking for the stepping stone to the next level. It's quite possible that a braneworld theory could provide a useful description once we understand better what's going on both with the physics and with the mathematics. I personally am hoping there will be multiple overlapping theories to chose from.
Time is not a dimension. Get a brane morans.
Time what is time
I wish I knew how
to tell You why
It hurts to know
Aren't we machines
Time what is time
Unlock the door
And see the truth
Then time is time again
SCISNE? ANUS SIMIAE!
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Wasn't there a song in the movie "Steppenwolf" about time turning into space?
teleny, friend of cats.
Has this happened before? And if it has, would there be any way to detect that it had happened? It seems strange for something to only happen ONCE in the life of the universe so far, and for it to happen right around the time that we exist...
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
This shift is described and predicted by every group imaginable. Shamans in the West, Energy Masters in the East, and every brand of channeler, seer, crystal ball hockum reiki flakey and voodoo witch spotted throughout the rest of the world. --While much of this comes in the form of garbled nonsense, (disinformation arrives in lively spurts from the etheric realms as well as the physical), this common theme of a physical paradigm shift remains universal.
So I wonder what is going on with this story. --Is it a "Faked Moon Landing" straw man designed to be ridiculed on the scientific front? Or is it the result of a researchers who are plugged into the esoteric scene and wanted to see how the maths fell? Or is it an honest exploration into physics derived from pure, unaffected interest in the universe.
I'd be curious to know what they mean by, "the recently fashionable sudden singularities", which they seem to think may be an indication that their findings hold water. In my cursory googling about, I cannot quite determine whether "Sudden Singularities" are a physically observed trend in astrophysics, or a mathematical discovery which is blowing holes in current theoretical models of reality.
Whatever the case, I'd be interested to see how this theory bounces when peer reviewed.
-FL
Whose ass am I kissing?
ahahaha... You're just an ass kisser in my book. I know. I meet ass kissers like you all the time. Kissee, kissee... Haysoos Martinez! The time traveling crackpot's been dead for a while, now. Stop kissing his ass. ahahaha...
PS. Nothing can move in spacetime. You can pack that up your ass. How about that? ahahaha... AHAHAHA... ahahaha...
was the first thing that popped into my head.
Uhhh...whut?
I don't care - I just hope it happens on the weekend so I don't have to go back to work.
rm
Sci-Fi Storm
The article makes perfect sense to me, but it does leave me with 2 major concerns :
1) How is this likely to affect my ebay activities ? If that item that I really NEED ends in 1 minute and 43 seconds at the time of the flipover, then will I be perpetually stuck in a 4D world without my precious item, or will I exist in a state where that same precious item is mine only in some ethereal quantum form ? (ie - its there, but not quite there at the same time)
2) As a programmer, I only really care about the data and code itself, but the customers driving the development seem to be obsessed with such abstract concepts as timesheets and deadlines. Will the flip to a 4D space only existence eliminate timesheets, deadlines and other such nonsense altogether ? If so, I could probably accept the loss of my precious ebay items that Ive almost won.
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Sorry for the obvious question (at least for some of you physists), but if we don't have a "time" dimension, how will the universe work? I was under the impression that most of physics is based on the fact that all sorts of teeny little things are vibrating and spinning and such, all of which require time (velocity = distance/time, after all). If suddenly we have another spacial dimension, doesn't everything just freeze up?
Tomorrow or the next life, you will never know which comes first. ;-)
jobst
to code or not to code, that is the question.
The idea that anything cosmically interesting or unusual has happened in the 100K or so years of modern human existance is extremely unlikely. Equally unlikely is that anything interesting or unusual is about to happen.
I'm keeping my geek badge, but you can have this fogie badge I lifted off of a dying Netware engineer.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
So, in the future, "when questions" will become "where questions".
It's sorta like marriage in reverse, then. In the early years, it's a question of where. Shortly afterwards, it always a question of when. Always, "when?"
If the theory stands up to testing, maybe even becomes a reality, I can say with total certainty that we're going to be royally f*cked.
My boss has now declared that our fifteen-minute breaks are to be replaced by 15-centimeter assholes!
The physicist Crookes concluded the temperature changes
had essentially to do with a kind of fourth dimension in space...
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So, it may be a mile marker, but it isn't the end of the universe. It just happened to be when the Mayans decided to 'turn over' their long count calendar back to 0.
I will not vouch for the accuracy of this information or of the sites below. I have glanced at them and it makes sense on the surface (leaving out all of the mumbo jumbo).
THE MAYAN CALENDAR END-DATE
THE HOW AND WHY OF THE MAYAN END DATE IN 2012 A.D.
James Powell
Shamelessly stolen from the Snopes forums.
"explain how starlight could be billions of years old on a 3 day old earth."
Ok I will bite - perhaps the stars were already there billions of years before the Earth?
Also the idea of the visible universe being the inside of a black hole is not new, Hawking's brief history of time mentions it (although I think the idea predates the book). It also says that a black hole of universe sized proportions would not have the huge tidal forces associated with stellar sized black holes, therefore you could cross the event horizon (ie: fall into the hole) without noticing it.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Long distance communication over radio (or any other light-speed limited carrier) is not useful, and I would be surprised if any star system wants to wait 300 years before they know what's today's price on some ore. It would be of interest to historians, maybe, but not to any customer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkxieS-6WuA
Actually, inside the event horizon of a black hole, all of that switches around - when you cross the event horizon, time and space switch. More mathematically, if you look at the Schwartzschild Metric (the mathematical description of space near a black hole - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwarzschild_metric has the form of it), you'll see that when the radial coordinate r passes from outside to inside the event horizon, the radial and time coordinates switch signs, making paths constant in space outside the event horizon constant in time inside the event horizon (and vice versa). Now this is something like what the article authors are saying is "about to happen" in out universe, but with an unrelated cause (e.g. they aren't claiming anything about falling into black holes or the like)
Another important thing to bear in mind is that the observed universe is essentially completely isotropic on large scales. This means that we cannot be inside a black hole because then the black hole singularity has to be located somewhere (the r=0 point in the Schwartzschild metric) that isn't here, and this would manifest as a preferred direction in the universe. And there isn't one.
As for the idea of the Big Bang being a "repeatable occurrence in the limitless void of space," bear in mind that the Big Bang occurred everywhere - again, the universe is isotropic on large enough scales, so saying the Big Bang could happen again, just "somewhere else" is a meaningless statement. Of course, when you start throwing in the brane theories with more than 4 dimensions, things get more complicated (e.g. multiple big bangs can be constrained to branes that are limited along some 5th or 6th or 7th or whatever dimension... but I don't know too terribly much about that side of things)
It's great to think about these kinds of ideas, but (despite what some present-day particle physicists seem to think) they always need to be tempered with some observational checks about the universe that we actually live in to be anything more than an unusual mathematical oddity.
As a final note, though, your original idea of time "slowing down" has been investigated by some people - I don't have any references off hand, but there has at times been talk of a time-varying speed of light. The key point is that c is the "constant" that you multiply by time to get dimensions of space - having it vary in time would lead to a more complicated relation between time and spatial coordinates, that may well seem to result an an acceleration. The problem is, this seriously mucks up how light and other EM radiation works, and its very difficult to get the observed universe to be observable at all if you let this happen.
It's oficial.
Apologies for the broken link. Attempt 2: http://mclean-campbell.com/postcards/Don'tPanic/dp.htm
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
I believe the theory has more than 4 dimensions total.
It sounds to me like we would have a motionless (timeless) 4D space.
... otherwise, it would be God's way of making us live forever in heaven or hell; by eliminating time, completely!
Wow! Those are all written by the same guy?!?
There are 3 books I read in 6th grade (11/12 year old) that really, really stuck with me: Interstellar Pig, House of Stairs, and The Boy Who Reversed Himself. I had NO IDEA they were all written by the same guy! Amazing! Here it is 15 years later and The House of Stairs still makes me feel weird...man, talk about a trip down memory lane!
I actually made an Interstellar Pig game based on the one in the book...and actually played it with some of my friends! Good times, good times.
Of course, shortly after that I got into David Eddings/Robert Jordan/Raymond Feist and read fantasy for 10 years before getting back into sci-fi.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
This is a bunch of bad conjecture. As a physicist, I won't even even begin.
Very well stated. Wick rotations are usually just a calculational tool in QFT (or in lattice QCD/QED, you can use it to model temperature dependence); nevertheless, I do think it is interesting to ask what the real physical consequences of a Euclidan space-time might be.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
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Most of the new Doctor Who has been just a steaming pile of effete, metrosexual, politically correct bullsh*t [what else would you expect from the BBC these days?], but I caught that episode the other night, and it was actually pretty darned good.
Easily the best episode of any that I've seen of this current revival of The Doctor, and proof that good story-telling can overcome a big deficiency in the special-effects budget.
Luis, we're still waiting, or are you just another Internet kook?
It's actually part of the second Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov. Not to be confused with the Second Foundation trilogy, which would be something entirely different... if it existed.
What wouldn't Jesus do?!
I can't believe this ... two offtopic mods, one coming 36 hours after it was posted...
... rather than saying "first post" as the first post, or near it, it was a very, very, late "first post" posting, but because all the characters are in the first column, and TFA was about changing the time coordinate to a space coordinate, it was a new way to get a "first post"... sort of a prank-the-meme concept.
See, guys, it was a joke
If there's a mod reading this, and you halfway see my point, please mod the parent "funny" just to partially restore my faith in humanity...
Thanks.
Read the best of all of Slash: seenonslash.com
I understand that recently a scientist predicted the size of the universe. Also that Albert Einstein had a similar theory that he threw out. However I always had this idea that the universe is ever expanding and infinite in a sense. That the farther out you get the greater the chance that light will be blocked by matter. I kind of just think of it as matter comes into the universe from a dimension that can not be seen or recognized by us mortals. It would probably be created in the largest voids between matter and destroyed in black holes. Never really bought he hole dark energy/dark matter theory. Although I suppose that I am just a non college educated dabbler.